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Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore is a giant sculpture carved into the mountains of the Black Hills. Originally created in 1927 and finished in 1941, Mount Rushmore stood as a testament of American ingenuity and patriotism for almost one hundred and fifty years. When the Great War arrived in 2077, Mount Rushmore was spared from the destruction of Rapid City because of the monument's distance from the city, although quite a bit of the mountain was coated with gray ash for several years afterward. During the Native Revolt of 2077, several Indian youths vandalized Mount Rushmore, though only with spray paint (Jefferson got a mustache). One boy did try to detonate a grenade in Theodore Roosevelt's eye but only ended up killing himself in the process. In the following years, Mount Rushmore was mostly left alone. Over the generations, knowledge of the mountain's creators and meaning was lost and many began to see it with reverence or sometimes even worship. Similar circumstances might be the Pyramids of Giza being "discovered" by various different cultures over time. The first man to try to lay claim to the mountain was in 2226 by Al Wolcott, the leader of a large raider group. Declaring himself king of the mountain, Wolcott centered his raider band around Mount Rushmore and renamed them the Mount Rushmore Neo-Patriots. After declaring his reign, King Wolcott continued raiding and bullying small settlements to expand his influence. This backfired during the Great Raider Wars when King Wolcott joined the raiders. His prominent status and location attracted the attention of an ambitious military man from Deadwood, George Armstrong Custer II. However, Custer did not immediately resort to violence when dealing with King Wilcott and offered Wolcott an alliance. Wilcott responded by calling Custer "a damn pup" and refusing. Custer responded by mounting a full-scale assault on Mount Rushmore in 2248. The Battle of Mount Rushmore was a narrow loss for Custer that cost King Wolcott most of his men. The Neo-Patriots, knowing the old man would fight to the end and that they could not hold out forever, decided to decapitate Wolcott and bring his head to Custer as a peace offering. Custer was disgusted by this and killed any remaining Neo-Patriots. With this, he took control of Mount Rushmore in 2249. Impressed by the sheer size and (rhetorical) weight of the mountain, Custer vowed to restore Mount Rushmore to its original state, no even better than before. In 2249, Fort Rushmore was constructed out of wood to both serve as Custer's base away from Deadwood and to oversee the reconstruction of Mount Rushmore. Stone was added later to the fort, and it was eventually completed in 2256. Mount Rushmore itself was a more difficult endeavor. The petty, aesthetic vandalism of the mountain (Jefferson's mustache) was removed at the minimal cost of life. However, problems like Theodore Roosevelt's eye and natural erosion were bigger problems. Not only that but Custer also wanted to incorporate his own face onto the left side of the mountainside in 2258. After a string of deaths and initial failure, Custer decided to hire an expert sculptor from the FSV in 2275, a dwarfish mutant named Jonah Gambit. Only a small scale sculptor and architect, Gambit was totally out of his element when actually confronted with the mountain. Gambit took the job anyways out of artistic curiosity and actually succeeded in restoring the face of Mount Rushmore. However, Gambit and his project ran into a brick wall in 2280. It seemed impossible to add another face, nonetheless Custer's, to Mount Rushmore without threatening the stability of the mountain. Nevertheless, the project continued, even after the beginning of the Generals' War. Gambit attempted to add Custer's face as slowly and carefully as possible, so as not to damage the rest of the monument. In 2287, only a fourth of Custer's face is finished after almost thirty years of work. Custer remains optimistic about the project, while Gambit is foreboding but hopeful, seeing it as what he will be remembered for years to come. Category:Places Category:Sites Category:Badlands